Dave (Brandon Salkil) is a 24-year-old loser who scrapes a living painting digital erotica for sci-fi geeks. When he's not creating his 'art' (oh, the agony and the ecstasy of painting alien semen in zero gravity), he's busy masturbating while eavesdropping on his sexually frustrated, pregnant neighbour Esther (Nicole Gerity), who lives in the apartment below. It is while he is knocking one out to the sounds of Esther's self-gratification that he suffers an unexpected heart attack.
After surgery, Dave is informed that he has poor circulation and desperately needs a replacement heart if he wants to go on living. His solution: sell his soul to the devil in exchange for a new organ, one that, if he looks after it properly, can give him eternal life. The only problem is that, according to the small print in the contract he hurriedly signs, he must now feed his new heart two humans a week in order to keep it pumping.
Of the three films I have seen by low-budget horror director Dustin Mills (the others being Kill That Bitch and Bath Salt Zombies), this is easily my favourite. It offers up the same sort of lurid content to be found in the other two films—bargain basement gore and gratuitous nudity from a selection of tattooed women—but it also has a wickedly dark (and often very silly) sense of humour that makes it all the more irresistible.
Taking his cues from such low-budget classics as Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case, Mills has crafted a delightfully warped tale that—in addition to a chatty tentacled heart with one eye—features such demented delights as a chubby tattooed bird being pulled down the loo while taking a leak, a couple interrupted by the heart's killer tentacles while having sex, a perverted demon called Belial who offers to fart on Dave while he cranks one out, and an Evil Dead-style splat-stick finale that sees Dave attacking the monstrous heart with a carving knife.
Even though this is utterly deranged, lowbrow nonsense, all shot on a micro budget, Mills' script is surprisingly well written, his cast put in reasonable performances, and the director displays a keen knowledge of his craft, employing an impressive range of film-making techniques.
6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for having the nerve to make the monster so laughable when we finally get to see it (a nod to the shonky nature of Henenlotter's creature in Basket Case, perhaps).
